Nearly 100 (and Counting) Dead as Israel Launches Large-Scale Ground Invasion of Gaza City

The Jewish-led rights group IfNotNow was among those condemning Israel's ground invasion of Gaza City on Tuesday, warning that the Israel Defense Forces have left more than 1 million people in the northern city and its surrounding towns with an "impossible choice": "flee once more without anywhere safe to go or face indiscriminate bombs and bullets from Israeli forces."

At least 91 people in Gaza City were killed by the latter on Tuesday as two divisions of the IDF launch ground attacks across the city, with a third expected to join them in the coming days.

Israeli forces have ordered people in the city to leave for the so-called "humanitarian zone" of al-Mawasi in the south, but the area has also been bombarded repeatedly—including an attack two weeks ago, when eight children as young as 3 years old were killed while lining up for water, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The Israeli government last month approved the takeover of Gaza City, with the aim of taking control of all of Gaza and ethnically cleansing the entire exclave, and since then about 150,000 people have been forced to flee south while the IDF has stepped up aerial and artillery attacks, destroying whole neighborhoods.

At Al Jazeera on Tuesday, Tareq Abu Azzoum described "relentless bombardment from military operations that are leaving the landscape completely uninhabitable" in Gaza City.

"The Israeli military has deployed different military tactics to force people to leave Gaza City to the south—most notably excessive firepower, seen in the deliberate destruction of high-rise buildings," said Abu Azzoum.

“It is inhumane to expect nearly half a million children battered and traumatized by over 700 days of unrelenting conflict to flee one hellscape to end up in another."

Israeli human rights groups including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Physicians for Human Rights called on officials to lift the mass evacuation order and said it constitutes ethnic cleansing and forced displacement.

Tess Ingram, a spokesperson for UNICEF, said the mass displacement of families is a "deadly threat for the most vulnerable."

“It is inhumane to expect nearly half a million children battered and traumatized by over 700 days of unrelenting conflict to flee one hellscape to end up in another,” she said, adding that the IDF's escalation in Gaza City forced nutrition centers in the city to shut down this week, "cutting off children from a third of the remaining treatment sites that can save their lives."

Abu Azzoum described "tragically consistent" scenes of Palestinians—almost 70,000 in the past few days—loading whatever belongings they have left into vehicles and donkey carts to flee their homes:

Many people said in the initial days of the ground operation that they would not leave Gaza City. But, right now, Israel is burning the ground. They’re destroying every kind of civilian infrastructure and have cut off aid deliveries to the city, all for one clear purpose—to relocate them into the southern part of Gaza.

Some people are unable to afford the cost of transportation. We see exhausted faces, mothers carrying their babies, elderly people on foot.

What is so devastating to see is the vulnerability of children who have lost their parents and found themselves on the move again. They’re struggling to find any patch of land where they can stay in the absence of their parents and are completely reliant on strangers to survive.

At IfNotNow, executive director Morriah Kaplan called the ground assault on Gaza City "a chillul hashem, a desecration of God's name."

"With just days until Rosh Hashanah, we watch in horror as the Israeli military bombs and invades Gaza City, putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in mortal danger," said Kaplan, adding that the invasion "spells almost certain death for the remaining hostages" who were kidnapped by Hamas from Israel on October 7, 2023.

"The Israeli government’s willingness to sacrifice their own citizens to continue its campaign of destruction is devastatingly clear," said Kaplan. "It is critical that we say loudly and unequivocally: This invasion won’t make a single Jew anywhere in the world safer."

She called on international funders of the Israeli military—including the largest, the United States—to take immediate action to stop Israel's assault on Gaza, which a United Nations commission said Tuesday is a genocide.

"The only way to halt this devastation," said Kaplan, "is to end the flow of weapons that Israel relies on to fuel its genocide."